Actually, I think living Latin, if it is ever to live outside of academic circles, will inevitably evolve. However, I have a few remarks regarding this:

1. I think it's unlikely that we will ever speak Latin with one another. An ex-member of ours, L. Silvanius Florus, told he wanted to have a Latin-speaking household. It's an interesting experiment but I wonder if it worked / is going to work. It's actually very difficult to try and speak Latin if there's no one to speak it with on a regular basis. In high school, by the way, Latin was taught passively, meaning Latin --> Dutch and not Dutch --> Latin because we didn't need it.

2. If we speak Latin I think we should really depart from correct, academic Latin. By this I mean no muddling and mixing of cases, verb conjugations or pronunciation mistakes. Of course the lower classes of the Roman population spoke (and wrote?) Latin which many academics would consider wrong but was probably closer to everyday speech and interaction. However, one should take in account that there are always differences between language standards and the actual speech of the ordinary man (this also holds true for modern languages... if I tried to write Scots English it would probably be considered wrong). Secondly, we don't actually know what "ordinary Latin" really was like. We have most information about academic, literary Latin so we should really go with that.

I think one of the most useful, although again passive, tools for learning Latin on the Internet is the weekly radio broadcast of news in Latin by Radio Finland. Here is the address followed by a short description from the website itself:

Nuntii Latini - News in Latin - is a weekly review of world news in Classical Latin, the only international broadcast of its kind in the world, produced by YLE, the Finnish Broadcasting Company.

Nuntii Latini is heard around the world on short or medium wave and via satellite on Radio Finland, the external service of the company. Nuntii Latini is now also available on the Internet, on RealAudio, at http://www.yle.fi/fbc/latini/recitatio.html . In Finland it is broadcast on the national FM network YLE R1.

Launched in September 1989 by producer Hannu Taanila at the Finnish Broadcasting Company, Nuntii Latini is edited by Professor Emeritus Tuomo Pekkanen and Docent Reijo Pitkäranta of Helsinki University. For thirteen years they have taken it in turns to put together the five-minute weekly bulletin, which consists of the main international news headlines of the week and includes Finnish news of international interest, and arts, science and sports topics as appropriate.

At his request, I'll be sending along my 'Latinum minimissimum' materials to Draco. Once he 'works out what to do with them' (paraphrasing him here), he may post them on the site.

Having people to talk to...yes, that *is* the modern-day Latin-speaker's biggest problem, isn't it? I resolved it by teaching all the neighbors' kids. That gave me rapping-partners, yes...but of course their Latin was limited to what I knew, which wasn't much. All the same, this was probably as close to creating an 'immersion' environment as I ever came. I still consider my listening skills to be much the lesser of my speaking, reading and writing skills, as these others can be developed in solitude and aural comprehension cannot.

I like Draco's ideas about vernacular Latin; they closely parallel my own. (That's why, in the recent mini-flap about my .sig block, I told the critics to just chalk it up to my being a Provincial.)